Sun Chemical Europe announced that due to unrelenting raw material cost increases and supply shortages, prices of its products in the publications market will increase by the following, effective July 1, 2011:

• €0.25/kg for all heatset inks.
• €0.20/kg for all coldset inks (black and color).
• 6% for all sheetfed conventional inks – excluding colors containing V23, which will increase by 20%.
• 6% for all sheetfed founts.

Raw materials used to manufacture publication inks continue to be subject to extreme shortages due to increased demand, destocking within the industry, plant closures and capacity reduction.

This, together with production and environmental restrictions, is having a serious impact on availability and costs of materials such as carbon black, gum rosin, vegetable oils and various pigments, which are key cost drivers for publication inks. As another major cost driver, the price of oil has increased by more than 60% since the start of 2010 alone.

Further increases have become unavoidable due to an increasingly stressful supply situation.

“We continue to work very hard to control the costs of our publication inks, but we are not able to completely offset the drastic raw material price increases and global supply chain instability we’ve seen in the past year, and this has necessitated another price increase,” said Felipe Mellado, chief marketing officer of Sun Chemical. “We’re working closely with our customers to help them get the most out of their inks, and to develop new value oriented products and services that can help them grow their business despite this challenging marketplace.”